Many individuals experience tooth loss, due to age, trauma, or other affliction. Such loss can impair certain abilities, such as the ability to chew food. Moreover, many individuals view a missing tooth or teeth as cosmetically undesirable. These circumstances have long given rise to artificial teeth and other dental appliances, the nature and operational manner of which vary widely.
Dental appliances can present numerous obstacles. For artificial teeth, a suitable anchoring must be made within the mouth of the patient to provide sufficient durability for intended use. This often requires drilling into, or otherwise attaching an anchor to, the bone of the patient's mouth. In such devices, both the attachment and the dental appliance itself must be capable of prolonged exposures to the rigors of the mouth, such as moisture and the forces associated with chewing, without degradation at an unsatisfactory rate.
Due to irregularities in the mouths of individual patients, such as bone structure and positioning of remaining teeth, it is often necessary that artificial teeth be disposed at particular orientations. There exist various devices that seek to overcome this obstacle, including one-piece attachment mechanisms, ball shaped attachments and other devices, many of which screw directly into an implant to retain a denture. For example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,843,653, 6,146,383 and 3,732,621, the respective disclosures of which are all incorporated by reference herein in their entirety, all disclose such dental devices. However, such abutments do not perform well when the corresponding implants are angled beyond a few degrees. In particular, one-piece ball shaped abutments have been used to connect overdentures to implants. However, when these implants are not approximately parallel to each other, the corresponding denture cannot be easily seated. Such a condition results in excessive wear, thereby resulting in malfunction, user discomfort and the attendant negatives of corresponding replacement or repair efforts.
The subject matter of the present disclosure is directed to overcoming, or at least reducing the effects of, one or more of the problems set forth above.